In Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, the letter "é" is used to indicate that a terminal syllable with the vowel e is stressed, and it is often used only when it changes the meaning. See Acute accent for a more detailed description.

Like in English, é is respected when writing foreign words, mainly from French. It is also used to differentiate the article "een," equivalent to either "a" or "an" in English, and "één", the number one. It is also used to add visual stress on words in the same way English might use italics. In Dutch, some people use "hé" as a greeting, like "hey" or "hi".

É is a variant of E carrying an acute accent; it represents an /e/ carrying the tonic accent. It is used only if it is the last letter of the word except in dictionaries or when a different pronunciation may affect the meaning of a word: perché ("why"/"because", pronounced [perˈke]) and pésca ("fishing", [ˈpeska]), to be compared with caffè ("coffee", [kafˈfɛ]) and pèsca ("peach", [ˈpɛska]), which have a grave accent.

In Portuguese, é is used to mark a stressed /ɛ/ in words whose stressed syllable is in unpredictable within the word, as in "péssimo" (very bad). If the location of the stressed syllable is predictable, the acute accent is not used. É /ɛ/ contrasts with ê, /e/. "É" can also mean "is": ela é bonita (she is pretty).

In Spanish, é is an accented letter and is pronounced just like "e" /e/. The accent indicates the stressed syllable in words with irregular stress, as in "éxtasis" or "bebé". See Diacritic and Acute accent for more details.

In Welsh, word stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable, but one way of indicating stress on a final (short) vowel is through the use of the acute accent, often found on e in borrowed words: personél[pɛrsɔˈnɛl] "personnel", sigarét[sɪɡaˈrɛt] "cigarette", ymbarél[əmbaˈrɛl] "umbrella".